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Shoe designer Tinker Hatfield was the primary designer with Michael Jordan on his signature basketball shoe for decades. In Rio, French pole vault record holder Renaud Lavillenie is the beneficiary of Hatfield’s services.

Lavillenie will compete in Nike’s pole vaulting shoe designed by Hatfield and his brother Tobie _ their first project working together.

Tinker is the artistic mind while Tobie is more mechanical in design. Both are former pole vaulters, and are in Rio with plans to watch Lavillenie.

Lavillenie will be competing in the Nike Zoom PV III. The Hatfields started working on Nike’s lone pole-vault specific spike in 2001.

“I don’t know that Nike has it on their list as a must-have, but we felt like it was something that needed to be done,” said Tinker, who first started working with Jordan on the third edition of his shoe in 1988. “It’s turned out to be a good move.

“In my lifetime we went from everyone wearing Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars to a myriad of different kinds of basketball shoes that work for different kinds of players. Track and Field is just not quite as big and powerful of a sport and the need for differentiation is just now being recognized at the highest level, just like basketball. It’s just taken a little longer, that’s all.”

Tobie added, “Pole vaulters before the pole vaulting shoe wore, basically, long-jump spikes and triple-jump spikes. There’s definitely quite a bit of difference between those events and the pole vault. Being former pole vaulters, we knew there was a need out there. We wanted to do this for the vaulters because it was meeting that need.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Relatives of Jesse Owens and America's 17 other black athletes from the 1936 Olympics were welcomed to the White House on Thursday by President Barack Obama for the acknowledgement they didn't receive along with their white counterparts 80 years ago.

Along with the relatives of the 1936 African-American Olympians, gloved-fist protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos and members of the 2016 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams met the president and first lady Michelle Obama. Obama congratulated the Rio athletes, thanked Smith and Carlos for waking up Americans in 1968 and praised 1936 Olympians who made a statement in front of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

TOKYO (AP) — An expert panel set up by Tokyo's newly elected governor says the price tag of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics could exceed $30 billion unless drastic cost-cutting measures are taken. That's more than a four-fold increase from the initial estimate at the time Tokyo was awarded the games in 2013.